Investigating health management practices of individuals with diabetes

Chronic diseases, endemic in the rapidly aging population, are stretching the capacity of healthcare resources. Increasingly, individuals need to adopt proactive health attitudes and contribute to the management of their own health. We investigate existing diabetes self-management practices and ways in which reflection on prior actions impacts future lifestyle choices. The findings suggest that individuals generate and evaluate hypotheses regarding health implications of their actions. Thus, health-monitoring applications can assist individuals in making educated choices by facilitating discovery of correlations between their past actions and health states. Deployment of an early prototype of a health-monitoring application demonstrated the need for careful presentation techniques to promote more robust understanding and to avoid reinforcement of biases.